This story is from the USA and appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald recently. I have edited it for length.
The job market has been sluggish for months and unemployment is rising as recession fears push more people to dust off their resumes and post on LinkedIn. At the same time, AI has turbocharged the job market, allowing candidates to apply to hundreds of roles and upping the pressure to stand out online.
All the while, a generational shift is taking place as a more digitally open, confessional Gen Z gets into the job market. It’s prompting a debate for longtime users: How far is too far on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn was founded 22 years ago, before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even MySpace existed. The platform has been experimenting with content for years, with a fluctuating mix of congratulatory career updates, news, newsletter and influencer “thought leadership.”
These days, members of Gen Z, born roughly from 1997 to 2010, are driving growth in LinkedIn signups as they increasingly join the professional world. They’re also fuelling the content shift on the website.
The younger generation sees LinkedIn more like the original Facebook, which burst onto the scene in 2004 as a place to connect with friends and share photos.
The older crowd on LinkedIn, which Kail estimates he has used every day for the past 12 years, is used to a more buttoned-up, business-first mentality. Gen Z’s approach is making them question their strategy.
Today on LinkedIn, it’s hard to miss Boomer, Millennial and Gen X executives oversharing bicep photos from the gym, former colleagues posting haikus, musings about the Venn diagram of love, loss and leadership and questionably qualified “wellness gurus”.
What makes a lot of LinkedIn posts ineffective is that people come off as aggrandising as they try to sell themselves to customers or potential employers, according to Bob Hutchins, a marketing strategist and AI adviser in Nashville whose 2022 LinkedIn post saying “This is not Facebook” got more than 70,000 likes and 4,500 comments.